Join me for "Centering Our Power" workshop for BIPOC

 

 

CENTERING OUR POWER

a drop-in workshop for BIPOC

 

via freeskewl 

 

Saturday, February 20, 2021

12pm EST (9am PST)

 

Join our BIPOC Zoom "circle" for an active meditation practice to center and ground you (and all of us) in expansive power. Come as you are and leave with the awareness of all that you are. We will work with practices that sense and move personal and transpersonal energies.

 

Bring whatever you love to have near you to support this self-care--a journal, divination cards, crystals, shells, stones, sacred images, essential oils, stuffed toys, family/ancestor photos, what have you.

 

This is a seated visualization but, if you like, feel free to move with it. You may turn your camera on or off as you prefer at any time.

 

Please respect this circle as BIPOC space.

Accessibility: Closed captioning will be available through Rev Live Captioning

 

No payment required!
Donations welcome: Venmo: @Eva-YaaAsantewaa 

Zoom link: zoom.us/j/3093774924

Zoom password: 640262

 

Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she), native New Yorker of Barbadian-immigrant heritage, works as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation as well as Editorial Director at Gibney. A veteran arts writer (since 1976), educator and curator, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. She blogs on InfiniteBody and edits Imagining: A Gibney Journal. In 2016, for Danspace Project’s Lost and Found platform, Eva created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of group improvisation featuring 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers. Her cast received a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. Eva is founder of Black Curators in Dance and Performance. She is also a Tarot counselor with forty-plus years of experience.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Workshops: Dance Without Walls (the nia love underground)

Dance Without Walls (the nia love underground)

co-facilitators:

Nia Love, Jesse Phillips-Fein and Benin Ford

Nia Love
(photo: Nia Love)

Gestures are atoms that make up the sheets of our memory...tissue that travel with us from light years away...traveling on our trajectory biding us both greetings and farewells! 

-- Nia Love

Jesse Phillips-Fein
(photo: Jeca Rodriguez)

Benin Ford
(photo: Nia Love)

This movement-based, multimedia living art workshop creates space where “we the people” can study ways to perform meaningfully, powerfully and truthfully through improvisations at the intersections of dance, nature, and urban structures. With movement, discourse, journaling, drawing, and building small ecological sculptures, we manifest new ideas about about ourselves from which communal and global solidarity can radiate. This work is built on foundation of deep support and trust; we help each other to fertilize our thoughts clearly and to use our bodies as both a landscape and a tool that excavates our power as a people, activates our well-being, and engenders collectivism. Our aim is to create malleable networks that bond and aid us in on-going practices of liberating and reclaiming what lies dormant in our mind-bodies. 

Friday July 17, 6-9pm

Saturday, July 18, 10am-1pm

Sunday July 19, 10am-1pm

$50/1 day

$95/2 days 

$135/3 days

Sliding scale for parents available

Sign up a friend and receive a 25% discount!

We are especially interested in “non-dancers.”

Multiple outdoor locations throughout New York City:

Day 1: River Bank State Park, 145th and Riverside (Manhattan)

Day 2: 98 4th Street between Hoyt and Bond (Brooklyn)

Day 3: Ball Field at 214 Street (The Bronx)

To register, email: undergroundstudiesnyc@gmail.com

Note: the underground is a seasonal event.
there will be a Fall Edition, dates TBD.

Don't fail to listen to Anna Deavere Smith and Sarah Lewis!

New York Public Library podcast:

Sarah Lewis & Anna Deavere Smith on Inspiring Failures

A discussion of Sarah Lewis's The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search of Mastery

Last workshops of the year with Eva: NYC and PA

Upcoming Workshops 

with Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ace of Cups from World Spirit Tarot
by Lauren O'Leary and Jessica Sczuka Godino
Llewellyn Publications, 2001

Saturday, October 25 

• When Bad Dreams Happen to Good People (Fort Washington, PA)

Join Eva at Diane Brandt Wilkes's Northeastern Tarot Conclave 2014 for a demonstration of the use of Tarot symbols in harnessing and directing the power of the nightmare. Other workshop facilitators include Rachel Pollack ("Mirroring the Dream") and Paula Chaffee Scardamalia (From Dreams to Tarot and Back Again").

Get complete program, schedule and registration information here.

Saturday, November 8

• Image & Psyche: Through the Portal (Brooklyn, NY)

Guided by Eva in safe community space, take a shamanic journey into the realm of Tarot and other oracular symbols to discover your own wellspring of creativity, wisdom, healing and transformation. Open to participants at all levels of experience with Tarot--from newbies to experts.

Listen to an audio preview here.

To inquire about registration, use Eva's Contact form here.

The music is playing me: the great Sonny Rollins explains

Sonny Rollins: 'You Can't Think And Play At The Same Time'
by NPR Staff, May 3, 2014

Actor teaches scientists how to communicate with the rest of us

Do I think artists sometimes need similar training in how to communicate with civilians? Yes, I do!

Alan Alda, Spokesman for Science
A conversation with Claudia Dreifus, The New York Times, February 24, 2014

Paulus Berensohn on the art of making a life

Paulus Berensohn

Do something. Start with pleasure.

So says Paulus Berensohn, author of Finding One's Way with Clay (1973), in a graceful documentary portrait by Neil Lawrence, To Spring from The Hand: The life and work of Paulus Berensohn (TOTM Film, 2013; 73 min).

Berensohn--whose wizard-like, generous life has embraced the art of dance as well as visual arts and crafts--loves to recite lengthy poems by heart and tell stories. In the short clip below, not included in the film, the artist recalls the pleasure of snaring a true thrift-shop find--a black leather jacket with a perfect fit--for $2 and wearing it while doing the most mundane things.

Everything is Art from TOTM Film on Vimeo.

To Spring from The Hand offers a colorful, laid-back visit with a resourceful man happily out of step with the contemporary art industry and completely at peace with himself at age 80. He talks about and illustrates his contemplative approach to creativity and living, moment to moment, in what he calls "radical presence."

"Everyone should put their hands on clay as a way of awakening their fingertips," Berensohn says, and this sounds like the wisdom of a Graham and Cunningham student who, as he professes, never left dance and continues to practice Qi Gong and The Alexander Technique. "We devour the Earth and don't pause to praise it, to thank and to sing up the Earth," he tells the filmmaker. The deep ecology of his practice as an artist and educator rests in a stubborn moral imperative: "It's the function of the artist to sing up the Earth."

Supporting interviewees--including a few of Berensohn's so-called "fairy godchildren," a status that sounds like more fun than simply having a mentor or creativity guru--attest to the power of this man's example. Lawrence's project--and Berensohn's--might just move you to pick up a pen or brush or lift your voice in affirmation.

To learn more about To Spring from the Hand and watch a clip from the film, click here.

Neil Gaiman: why reading is fundamental

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens
by Neil Gaiman, The Guardian, October 15, 2013

Women Writers and Artists Matrix announces November retreat

Join WWAM (Women Writers & Artists Matrix) for its Fall 2013 weekend retreat at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York -- Friday, November 1 through Sunday, November 3.

Workshops include:

Unpacking The Pandora's Box of Social Media - Suzi Banks Baum

What Takes Your Breath Away: Breathing in the Holy, Breathing Out Art - Leiah Bowden

Writing & Traveling Light: Holding On & Letting Go - Jan Lawry

The Art of Sacred Artifacts: Bookmaking Master Class - Sarah Shepley

Bookmaking: Simple Splendor - Sarah Shepley

Poetry: Mining The Source, Finding the Words - Barbara Louise Ungar

For complete information on activities, click here.

For registration, click here.

Women Writers & Artists Matrix is an association of kindred creative women dedicated to shifting the paradigm through words and images. Our aim is meet the needs of women who are artists or writers, and those who are endowed with both skills. Co-founded in 2010 by an artist and an author our organization affirms creativity as a vital, empowering and necessary aspect of women's lives. We are also committed to fostering community connections, sponsoring art exhibits, public readings and interactive projects.

What's really behind creativity: teamwork in the brain

The Real Neuroscience of Creativity
by Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific American, August 19, 2013

Cartoonist Lynda Barry on creativity in education

Cartoonist Lynda Barry Helps College Students Tap Innate Creativity
by National Public Radio, May 29, 2013

Your brain on art

How Does the Brain Process Art?
New imaging techniques are mapping the locations of our aesthetic response
by Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2012

Note and spark: Elizabeth Spiers on why note-keeping matters

On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age
by Elizabeth Spiers, Medium, March 6, 2013

Also, for some great note-taking tool inspiration, see the comments following this essay's reposting at this link on Lifehacker.

"Making Work" with Miguel Gutierrez

MAKING WORK
Workshop with Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez (Photo by Ves Pitts)

Monday-Friday, December 17-21

10am to 2pm

New York City Center

$200

In this workshop we will focus on the creative process in making body/movement based performance. Participants will spend the week making short pieces, mostly solos. I first offered this workshop in 2003, and have enjoyed its various permutations throughout the years. This is the first time I lead it in NYC in over three years.

Originally my reason for creating this workshop was that I wanted to find out if it was possible to create the conditions to teach something that can’t actually be learned – how to make work. I discovered that through unequal parts making, discussing, improvising and watching the work of other workshop participants, you can uncover and deepen your individual interests, your process and your work.

My interest is in creating a space where inherited notions of dance and performance are critiqued, absorbed or discarded in the service of creating performance that comes from a vital, necessary place and that speaks to a contemporary context. There is no one way to make work.

My teaching is influenced by: years of teaching this workshop, years of seeing shows and talking with various artists about them, my experiences working with many extraordinary performance makers, my experience in making my own work in various scales and in a host of places/conditions, my pseudo-Zen/Feldenkrais belief system that tells me you can’t force anyone to change but can create the conditions for spontaneous learning, and my belief that everyone is a creative artist of potential brilliance and that “genius is as common as dirt.” (John Taylor Gatto)

This workshop is useful for artists who are anywhere in their trajectories as performance makers.

Workshop participation is limited and by selection only. If you are interested please send an email/doc, one page max (500 words or so), with some information about yourself and why you interested in joining the workshop to Miguel@miguelgutierrez.org.

Please explain if you have any schedule conflicts. Priority will be given to those who can attend all of the days and times.

"Writing the Living Matrix" with Deena Metzger

Deena Metzger's Writing the Living Matrix

The imagination is a real place. The real life and our future reside there. It is rich with stories, visions and dreams. When we enter this sphere, the writing experience calls self and other(s) into dynamic relationship on the page. This writing can be like a council that holds all the voices, including our ancestors and descendants as cohorts. It develops from the intrigue that we can each imagine and enter a new literature that looks to and helps create a future, vibrant, beautiful and alive....

To follow Story is to understand the path of healing.
Each of our stories is a universe.
Each one of us is living a story. 
To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.

 --Deena Metzger (Author, Writing for Your Life)

Click here to learn more about and register for Metzger's Writing the Living Matrix workshop at Rowe Camp & Conference Center (Rowe, MA in the Berkshires), October 12-14.

Susan Rethorst: A Choreographic Mind

I've just finished reading essays by a dancemaker who, while pressing words to fine use, celebrates quiet, visceral intuition over verbal, intellectual modes of being that are usually more highly prized. Susan Rethorst's A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (Teatterikorkeakoulu: Kinesis 2, 2012) takes her readers deep into the sensibilities of an artist who chooses to embrace "not knowing, not quite controlling," honoring what her body tells her and what the dances she makes tell her, too.

The book presents two strands for us to follow: Rethorst's life-altering experiences in youth and her application of personal transformation to creative process. In a custody dispute, her father kidnapped her and her brother Johnny when they were quite young. Two years later, he kidnapped the boy again and, this time, she would not see Johnny until he was 21. I get the impression that while Rethorst must relate this disturbing history--which left her, into adulthood, disinclined to speak but inclined to watch people intently and read the subtle currents and language of bodies--she does so only to set the stage for a calm exploration of how dances are made, how they reveal and present themselves and how they might best be perceived by maker and witness alike.

Rethorst's discussions could benefit fellow choreographers; clearly, she hopes to share her ideas with young artists who frequently stumble over treacherous piles of shoulds and shouldn'ts--what this favored artist does, what that prominent critic appears to reject or champion, what Teacher says is the right thing to do, what's trendy among peers or presenters this season. To these artists, she offers her trust in the unconscious, the body, the ongoing conversation with the dance itself.

The mainstream dance critic, picking up this book, will feel his/her ears burn:

Basically, they tell you what they want to see, and how the piece before them does, or does not, answer to that. It is rare to hear people try to cut through their own taste to try to examine what the dance maker is doing with the form.

Elsewhere, she writes,

What it, the dance, is doing is a door to see what it is valuing, what its goals are, how it functions. Talk about dance is too often, in my opinion, full of implied lack, and the lacks reveal what the particular talker desires to get out of dance.

For someone who grew up not caring to talk much--and, in this and in Rethorst's talent for intuitive perception of people, spaces and things, I strongly identify with her--she certainly enlivens these pages with an impressive, persuasive voice. But, she advises, "don't take my word for it." (Word. There's that word, again....) Yes, your mileage may vary at times, but the journey will take you places you could never anticipate.

Order this book online.

Deadline reminder: "Writing on Dance" workshops

[photo (c)Deborah Feller]

Once again, I'm delighted to be facilitating the Writing on Dance workshop series at New York Live Arts. We'll be meeting this Spring on eight Wednesdays, from May 2 through June 20, 5-7pm.

This season, I hope to welcome not only prospective professional dance writers but also anyone who might enjoy playing with creative approaches to getting closer to dance, understanding and enjoying it more. This workshop welcomes anyone open to disrupting habits of perception, thought and written response.

Please check out all the details and application directions (deadline: March 26, 5pm EST) on NYLA's workshop page here.

Kindly link to this announcement and help me spread the word.

I'm looking forward to exploring dance with you!

What a dancer can teach a business leader

Dancer-choreographer Darrell Jones--whose Hoo-ha (twister pump breakdown) is currently featured in the From the Streets, From the Clubs, From the Houses on the Parallels platform at Danspace Project--inspired some creative innovation at Tom Tresser's MBA class at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Read more:

What’s Dance Got To Do With Business?
by Tom Tresser, Entrepreneur The Arts, February 12, 2012

Once again, Writing on Dance at NYLA!

Once again, I'm delighted to be facilitating the Writing on Dance workshop series at New York Live Arts. We'll be meeting this Spring on eight Wednesdays, from May 2 through June 20, 5-7pm.

This season, I hope to welcome not only prospective professional dance writers but also anyone who might enjoy playing with creative approaches to getting closer to dance, understanding and enjoying it more. This workshop welcomes anyone open to disrupting habits of perception, thought and written response.

Please check out all the details and application directions (deadline: March 26, 5pm EST) on NYLA's workshop page here.

I'm looking forward to exploring dance with you!

Seeing with Cunningham

"What is there to add?"

A writer colleague voiced this concern last night as we waited for the third program of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Legacy Tour at BAM.

Indeed. What to add about a durable dance institution only a year younger than I am, whose influence recharged dance-making in the modern age, whose generations of artists and students form a large part of the nervous system of contemporary and future dance, a company that, in a few weeks, will be no more?

What to add when so many words have been said and written over the years and, even more so, since the death in 2009 of its beloved founder?

I stayed for two of last nights three dances, for Pond Way (1998) and RainForest (1968), paying my respects and saying goodbye.

Dance does not leave us alone; it reshapes us. I believe that and spent an entire semester trying various wily ways to persuade college students of its truth. I could have done no better than to bring them all with me to witness the last Cunningham ensemble at work.

I know Cunningham's theater can train us to regard the solid earth with trust, to sturdily and cleverly connect with it for the physical and psychic strength to be a human being in space--more flexible, more capable, more creative. In this way, it reminds me of what I learned from women's and neopagan ritual back in the 1980s but demonstrated--stripped of mythic interpretation, of course--solely through the abstract actions of bodies on a stage.

On my way home last night, I found myself more than ever annoyed by the streaming Friday night traffic--vehicular and pedestrian--and wondering why. Then I realized that I'd just spent more than an hour under the influence.

After I got over being annoyed, I felt grateful for the time out of time that dance can provide. We have so few places of refuge, particularly in the urban environment, but sometimes dance can offer this chance to slow the breath, switch channels, detect subtle, often fleeting things that we usually miss out of habit and distraction.

Give yourself a steady diet of that, and there's no telling who you might become.

And so, thank you to Merce Cunningham, and his dancers, down through the years, for giving us all new ways to see, to imagine and to create.

BAM Next Wave Festival's presentation of The Legacy Tour concludes this evening with a 7:30pm performance of Program C: Pond Way, RainForest and Split Sides. Information here.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
(directions)

For information on the final performances of Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Park Avenue Armory (December 29-31), click here.